Radio UserLand

» see radio.userland.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Your blog was a file on your own hard disk. Radio UserLand ran as a program on the desktop and kept the entire weblog in a local database, pushing a rendered copy up to a server when you posted. UserLand's word for that push was upstreaming. The version strangers read on the web was the export.

UserLand Software was Dave Winer's company, started in 1988 after he left Symantec, run out of Los Altos with fewer than ten people on the payroll at any point. Its scripting environment Frontier had shipped for the Mac in 1992, and its browser-based publishing system Manila arrived in November 1999. Radio came out of both. It was demoed under the name Pike in March 2000 and shipped properly as Radio 7.0 a year later. Version 8.0 arrived in January 2002 and the last release landed in September 2005.

The price was $39.95 a year. That covered the software and a year of space on UserLand's own radio.weblogs.com, forty megabytes of it, so a writer who did not have a server did not need one. Content could be split into categories with a separate RSS feed per category, and each category could point at its own template. You could also skip UserLand's server entirely and upstream to a host of your own.

Radio's peak lines up almost exactly with my university years, and that is where the distance sits. Paid desktop software in 2001 meant a box on a shelf in a shop, and a $39.95 annual license charged to an international card for a program that published to a machine in California was not a transaction available to me. Blogging reached Turkey a bit later and reached it free, in a browser tab with nothing installed. So did feed reading.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the blog was on your hard disk ~

This design decision reads strangely now and it was the whole product then. Every hosted blogging service of the same period kept your writing on its own machines and handed you a login. Radio inverted it. The machine of record was yours and the web copy was a publication of it, so if the service went away you still had the writing. That is why UserLand could switch off radio.weblogs.com in 2009 without erasing anybody's archive in the way a hosted service does.

It also carried an RSS aggregator in the same window, which put reading and writing in one program at a moment when almost nobody was doing that. OPML, the outline format that feed reader subscription lists still travel in, was created in 2000 as Radio's native format for outlines. A lot of what the feed layer standardized on came out of this one small company arguing loudly for its own file formats.

~ the tag that turned into podcasting ~

Radio was the first commercially sold program to support the RSS enclosure, the bit of a feed item that points at an audio or video file instead of at a page. Winer had pushed the enclosure into RSS and needed something that could actually fetch one. Radio fetched it and dropped the file on your disk in the background.

Nothing much happened with it for a couple of years. Then people worked out that a feed reader downloading audio overnight was a radio station with no schedule, and the word podcasting turned up around 2004. The feature predates the name by three years, which is a fairly normal gap for anything useful.

~ what forty dollars a year bought ~

The subscription model was the reason it died and the reason it lasted as long as it did. Free hosted blogging took the whole bottom of the market, and by the middle of the decade a writer had no reason to pay for a client. But paying customers meant UserLand did not need advertising or an acquirer, so Radio kept running long after its cohort was gone, on maintenance releases and a small crowd who had built their writing around it.

UserLand posted the notice on 20 June 2009: the Radio UserLand service was closing at the end of that year. Salon's blog community had been sitting on the same infrastructure and went with it. Winer had already sold most of weblogs.com to VeriSign back in 2005, so the pieces of this company were being handed off in parts for years before the service itself stopped. What is left is a file format nobody credits and a delivery mechanism that carries a very large industry.

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